1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to targeted consumer marketing for optimizing the yield of perishable inventory.
2. Background Art
Many industries, such as restaurants, hotels, and theatres have fixed capacity and uneven demand patterns. In the periods where the demand is below the capacity, the merchant has excess inventory that perishes quickly. The perishable inventory may include unused tables at a restaurant, unoccupied rooms at a hotel, or empty seats at a theatre. If not utilized, this inventory will produce zero returns. Merchants in the past have tried to solve this problem by offering broad-based discounts to spur demand during low-demand periods. For example, some retail merchants have off-season discount sales. As another example, some airline providers sells unsold seats at a discount over the Internet. This broad-based approach, however, results in a low success rate, because the ratio of number of offers to number of acceptances is high. Further, notification of these broad-based discounts is usually only available to existing customers of a merchant or individuals geographically located near the merchant.
Several reservation platforms exist, such as OpenTable.com, run by Open Table, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.; RewardsNetwork.com, run by Rewards Network, Inc. of Chicago, Ill.; and DinnerBroker.com, run by DinnerBroker, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.
OpenTable.com is a supplier of reservation, table management and guest management software for restaurants. The OpenTable.com reservation system receives, on a daily basis, information about available inventory from merchants. A merchant connects with the OpenTable.com reservation platform and provides details of open and booked tables throughout the day. An associated electronic reservation book is used by the restaurant to continually manage all its reservations, not only reservations made online. Because this electronic reservation book is connected to the OpenTable.com reservation platform, a database of inventory that is being marketed by the reservation platform is dynamically updated. This is referred to herein as dynamic inventory. Therefore, when the electronic reservation book changes at a particular location, OpenTable.com servers quickly obtain that information and provide it to their customers. OpenTable.com has a loyalty program to incent users, where a user receives a certain number of rewards points for a given reservation. The rewards points can later be redeemed, for example, for gift certificates valid at various restaurants. However, OpenTable.com does not actively market the inventory to its users based on any user preferences. Instead, a user is limited to searching for a restaurant by oneself.
RewardsNetwork.com focuses on the couponless fulfillment of incentives using cash and rewards points. Over the telephone, merchants allocate a specific set of tables to RewardsNetwork.com, and this allocation does not change on a daily or weekly basis. That is, their availability is not dynamic, and merchants cannot respond to short term fluctuations in inventory that cannot be predicted ahead of time. RewardsNetwork.com can provide couponless fulfillment of its discounts through a credit on a member's credit card statement, after the user pays full price at the time of purchase. Alternatively, the value of the discount can be converted into rewards points and deposited into a specified rewards account (airline or otherwise) associated with the user. Like OpenTable.com, RewardsNetwork.com does not actively market the inventory to its users based on any user preferences.
DinnerBroker.com has a website on which offers are presented to users. Merchants can make available different offers for different times of day on different days of the week. The slate of offers changes periodically, such as once a day or once a week. A user contacts the restaurant to make a reservation, and then prints out a coupon to be redeemed at the point of sale. The incentive is a cash incentive, because it provides a discount at a point of sale. DinnerBroker.com does not actively market the inventory to its users based on any user preferences.
In addition to the lack of marketing of inventory to customers based on customer preferences, these systems also do not provide, in a single integrated environment, any couponless financial incentive, dynamic inventory offers and loyalty points to customers willing to consume goods at low periods of demand, which for the case of restaurants would be the off-peak hours. They also do not send out offers based on consumer differentiation on the basis of how active a consumer is in using the system. What is needed is a system that sends out offers to targeted consumers based on consumer preferences.